“Because of some dragons?” I scoffed. “Theor, we can fight them together – Redgate alone was enough to defeat the so-called ‘King of Dragons’ – if Everseer got the heretics to agree to a ceasefire, we could join forces –“

“But that doesn’t work, does it, Kas?” he said bitterly. “That’s what they wanted, in the beginning. What the first heretics wanted. But you didn’t want to listen. You didn’t want to stop the dragons, you didn’t want to stop the archmages, and now everyone will get chewed up in their mouths –“

“They’ve got you believing that too, have they?” I asked with a sigh. “Don’t you think we need to try to fight, before we admit defeat?”

“We will fight… once you’ve tried.”

“Once we’ve died, you mean? Once all the champions are dead – then you’ll step up.”

He started crying. “You haven’t seen it! That’s not up to me! I didn’t make any of this happen! I’m just – I just –“

I held my temper in check. Maybe I didn’t know him all that well, but Nighteye had been a friend, a true friend. I had to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Nighteye. Theor.” I put my hands on his upper arms and he fell into me, shuddering and weeping. “Theor, none of this is your fault. You’ve saved gods know how many lives, and if your worst sins are eating plants… killing a single grumpy horse when right at the end of your rope and being manipulated by a dark diviner… Your father –“

He recoiled, sobbing, glaring at me through his tears. “Don’t speak about Father!”

“I don’t know the details, what he did to you, what your brothers did. I’m not going to say that they love you, they want you back – none of that. But your true brothers…” I felt my voice catch in my throat, tears burning in the corners of my own eyes. “Your true brothers and sisters, those you fought beside… we love you, we want you back. Fang, man… that girl dotes on you. Nighteye…”

We regarded one another for a few moments.

“I can’t come back,” he said in a voice so soft it was evaporating on the air between his lips and my ears. “I can’t ever go back.”

“You could live here! You don’t have to go back to them, not your family, not if you don’t want to!”

“She will see me.” His voice carried certainty, and despair.

“She? You mean Everseer? ‘Vardae’, right?” I scowled. “How did you even get away from her? Did you escape from the Thirteen Candles?”

“We aren’t, hm, prisoners,” he said sullenly. “Once you pass the tests, they do let you leave –“

“You mean, you can just…”

“– but if she sees that I’m here, that I’m talking to you –“

“Please, just let me call Killstop –“

“No! She –“

Knock knock knock, came the gentle rapping on the door.

I couldn’t help the wry smile that twisted my lips. “You’ll have to come in through the window – I didn’t bring the key!” I called, turning back to unlatch and open the heavy shutters. “Go up to the roof, then come d-“

I needn’t have spoken. Within approximately two-point-five seconds of me swinging back the window-latch, Tanra was standing in the middle of the room. The blurred streak on the air she left in her wake scintillated in different shades of green before it faded.

“This has been one heck of a twenty-four hours, Kas,” she moaned. “Can’t we just let it be Yearsend?” Then she turned her masked face to our guest. “Hey, Theor.”

She raised her covering, revealing a serious expression – not frowning like her mask, but thin-lipped and disconsolate all the same.

“Killstop… You, hm, you shouldn’t be here.”

“You’re quite right, but what’s done is done,” the seeress replied smoothly. “You shouldn’t be here either, naughty boy. And no, Kas,” she glanced at me, “I can’t hide his trip here from her. He didn’t come here at my suggestion, did he? I’m going to hide this part of the visit with my actual presence, I suppose – but what came before? No. I’m sorry. She will find out he’s been here.” She tilted her head at the renegade once more. “But she sent him.”

“What?” the druid exploded. “No! N-no, she didn’t – I overheard her talking to Ithilya…”

His voice faded out.

“Exactly,” Tanra said, folding her arms across her chest. “You overheard her, she knew it – she spoke the words in your hearing so that you would come here. That’s why I didn’t know you were here until Kas resolved to call me. She could’ve sent you to get a better bead on Feychilde… or Killstop.” She raised a finger to her chin in thought.

The wind whistled shrilly through the unshuttered window.

“But there’s a chance she just wanted you to give us the information,” she went on, seeming unfazed at the prospect of an enemy even more puissant than Timesnatcher or Duskdown appearing through the rectangular hole in the wall. “I honestly have no idea whether she’d be aware of my involvement. It’s quite possible that you could hide the fact you know she used you from her, unless she gets an enchanter digging around in your mind. What was it, Nighteye? What did you overhear?”

“I… she said – gods…”

The druid slumped to the floorboards and, after a quick glance at each other, me and Tanra hunkered down where we stood to better meet his eyeline…

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

To feel less like I’m interrogating a friend.

“She said, hm, ‘she’s coming back’.” He affected Everseer’s level, almost swaggering tone. “I d-don’t even really know why I was listening, I wasn’t supposed to be listening, and they were going out of the door, so I didn’t think they thought I could hear them – I mean, I didn’t think they knew… She said, ‘Timesnatcher’s going to get a shock when he realises there are four, and he’s one of them.’ Then… then their voices faded.”

“Oh dear,” Tanra murmured, looking down at her hands, flexing the fingers.

I looked blankly between the two of them. “Who’s coming back? There are four what?”

“Don’t you remember, Kas?” Then Tanra put on an unmistakeable, unforgettable voice that still haunted my nightmares. “’In a moment we’ll be done, and say farewell. But it’s not goodbye – not for three of you at least.’”

“The… the eolastyr?” I muttered, shuddering.

“It took me a, hm, long time to figure it out, but it’s what I came up with too.” The druid looked up, met my gaze. “I don’t like the sound of it, either. I – I m-mean, Dustbringer, and –”

“It was a horrible night,” I said in agreement. “But – an eolastyr? We can’t not tell Timesnatcher, can we? Can you say you’ve received a vision, Killstop?”

She nodded, but her expression was dubious. “He might see through me, and that could be worse, Kas. Do you think, could we tell him that a heretic –“

“No!” me and Nighteye both blurted in unison.

“Hear me out! The closer to the truth, the more confused his analysis of events will become. Please trust me.”

“Don’t you know?” I asked her.

“Know what, Kas?”

She cast me an exasperated glance.

“You really don’t, do you?” I marvelled. “Timesnatcher told me you’re a Great One, or whatever. Just your involvement here will be enough.”

Now she frowned. “Are you sure? I’m not sure it matters… I –”

I cut her off: “It’s better than tiptoeing out on the ledge of Heresy.”

“I concur,” Nighteye murmured, “though I admit to understanding only, hm, a little of the context surrounding this situation; arch-diviners have long been a, hm, bugbear of mine, what with –”

“You and me both,” I said. “We in agreement, then, Killstop? We say it was a vision, nothing more.”

She raised her eyebrows, and a disbelieving grin slowly spread across her lips. “I guess we’re gonna lie to him. Directly. To him.”

“Come on, you know you live for the thrill.” I laughed lightly.

“I suppose,” she demurred.

“But, my friends, this… ‘eolastyr’ entity…” Theor seemed uncomfortable even just naming its breed. “What are we going to do?”

“‘We’? ‘We’ are going to do nothing, Nighteye.” I looked at the druid sadly. “Why, I don’t know… You could be a part of it again, a champion of Mund. No one even knows you are, or were, a heretic. We’ve been careful. You could come back, say you went on holiday – no one will care about the truth, they’ll just be glad…”

I let my voice fade out. I could already tell from the resolute look in his eyes that no matter how many words I contributed to the cause, his mind was made up.

“You don’t have to be one of them, whatever Everseer said.” Killstop supplied the parting blow. “Please, Theor, reconsider. There’ll come a time we run out of second, third, fourth chances…”

“You think I, hm, I don’t know. What I lost. What I gained. I’m, hm not stupid you know.” He looked down at his feet. “Winterprince has joined, you know?”

“We got Everseer’s message,” I said. “The body, the one that wasn’t his?”

“Oh.” Nighteye looked disturbed all of a sudden. “Oh, good…”

He shuddered into bird-form, then hopped onto the windowsill. He looked back over at us, the owl’s beady eye flicking from Killstop to me and back again, flashing in the green glow of my hand.

“I can still, hoot, call you my – my friend?” he asked in a small voice.

“Of course,” I replied, “always, my good man…”

Tanra just nodded.

Nighteye turned back to the snow-clogged air, spread his wings and leapt into the darkness.

We watched him fly away, disappear into the night.

“Everseer’s name is Vardae,” I murmured.

“Or that’s the name she chose to give them,” Tanra said, shrugging. “Now can we go to bed, please?”

I cast her an arch look, and she laughed, putting her hand on my arm fondly.

“You know what I mean. Can you, maybe, stop getting in trouble for just five or six hours? Just enough for me to recharge a bit.”

“I thought you were always having those nightmares,” I said, a bit mockingly.

I’d never thought to see her face drop like it did – she’d been looking unusually serious, solemn… but not scared.

“Tanra – sorry, I –“

“It’s okay.” She shook her head. “Just… that doesn’t mean I don’t need sleep, you know?”

“Of course, I – goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Kas.”

She blurred through the window, and was gone.

I locked the shutters, then tapped my wraith and floated across the road towards my own bed. I checked everyone was sleeping, safe within the shielding, then laid myself down and shut my eyes.

If I’d thought I was having trouble sleeping before, I had no idea. Now, on top of Timesnatcher and twin foreign sorceresses, on top of Wyre and Em and Jaid and Jaroan, I had this:

Nighteye.

I found it hard to explain to myself just why I cared so much about him. There were plenty of champions I knew better, and, due to his absence, plenty of champions I’d fought alongside more often… Sure, he’d saved me when Belexor’s curse forced me into the rat-form, and we’d had fun that night, before we fought the vampire assassins… Or, at least, I’d had fun. He’d been lying that night – parents in the Shining Circle, no siblings… Carefully weaving his web of deceptions about us, so that we wouldn’t figure out his identity… so that we wouldn’t try to help shoulder his burdens.

That was it. That was why I cared. Because he cared. He was one of the few people I’d met whose concern over others seemed to come before his concern over himself. More so than myself, more than Em or Tanra or any of the others – Theor cared. All while suspecting it was going to earn him some kind of horrible punishment, perhaps execution, he’d gone out of his way to track me down, pass on the information.

And Everseer, Vardae, had forced him to kill his own horse? It was so unlike him that it really had me worried. He still seemed unwilling to kill when he hadn’t been commanded to do so, when it concerned only his own well-being – the horrible slenderness of his frame, his talk about being incapable of eating food – but he was trapped in the paradox. Soon enough, Vardae would find a way to finish her work, complete her masterpiece, and the druid would become irreversibly dark, nails stained not with the blood of those he was helping but those he was slaughtering…

It won’t happen. It won’t. I won’t allow it.

And then the eolastyr…

I remembered the thing’s face, her horrible crooning voice. The way she’d let Dustbringer rip himself in half with his own infernal weaponry. The way she’d taunted us over his dying body.

If an eolastyr really does show up, and it really is the same one…

I didn’t make any promises to myself, but I knew it wouldn’t go pleasantly for either one or both of us next time. I would put everything into the confrontation, kill or be killed.

And Irimar had to be informed, sooner rather than later. He would want to know – he was to be one of the four… According to Vardae at least. Everseer, whose motivations were worse than inscrutable… Did it make sense for her to warn us? If I supposed the eolastyr would otherwise come to claim the souls of a number of archmages for the dead dragons, it did fit with her reasoning, didn’t it?

Drop it.

There was no way I was going to sleep now. I got up, threw on my robe, and went out. The cries of the dispossessed had quietened down by now, but there would always be someone in need of help, and I was a champion.

I cared about Nighteye, because I wanted to emulate him. I wanted to help – I wanted to care.

And I never, ever wanted to end up in a place like the Thirteen Candles.

But I’d take it over Magicrux Zyger.

* * *